meadows. A place of shade. The sound of a stream reaches my ears. Dogwood trees make the place sound like a river when the breeze moves through the leaves.
My father knew all his grandfather’s stories about the town or towns like it. Stories of how they survived there, of how they were driven out of the west and chased back to San Francisco. As they rushed back across the land they worked on, they burned their letters, their diaries, poems, anything with names. My father never told me these stories. He died too soon. He only taught me to sing “Home on the Range” and I’d teach him the songs I learned in school. But I knew all his stories because my mother told me all his stories and later I found stories he had written down and put away in an old shoe box.
The year before his death we moved from Berkeley to Guam. In 1956 my mother called the dirt road in front of our house on Guam “Ocean Street,” and gave the only house on that street the number “25.” We began to receive mail there from home. I was six and until we had moved to Guam I remembered only a few isolated events out of my childhood in Berkeley, where my parents were students. When we returned to Berkeley in 1957, Father was dead. And I remembered everything.
In 1956 my father taught me to sing “Home on the Range” on that island in the Pacific Ocean. Standing there in the heat of an ocean lagoon, I sang out for my father about our home on the range and my friends the buffalo and antelope. The sun was shining, it was raining, and the steam of the humid day filled my lungs. The waves washing up on the edges of the lagoon made the green grass seaweed between my toes.
I must have been calling my father “Bobby” for a few years before we arrived in Guam, but it was there that I actually remember for the first time calling him by that name. I had given him that name when, as a baby, I mispronounced “Daddy.” That wasn’t his real name, just my name for him, it made him the object of my play, a friend I learned my imagination from. When we lived on Guam, I got the last good look, the last clear view of my family at the age of six. On Guam, my world was a boy’s paradise and I remember all of it and its memory is constant. In 1956, World War II was still on for me. If I dug beneath the fallen leaves and loose earth near the base of the tree, I always found gleaming brass bullet casings. And there was a fighter jet in the woods behind our house. It was a world of real aircraft carriers, destroyers, submarines, bombers, sunken ships, and palm-lined white sandy beaches. At night the humid animals of the day, the lizards, insects, and rodents, made a zoo of noises in my sleep.
On this island, the tropical night still hisses its hot breath against my ears. The day must cool into evening, Father. When you and I sat on the front porch, there was no movement to cool the day. I followed my father into the jungle behind our house, the boondocks, the name itself was myth and legend. The enemies of all our life were hiding in the grasses, behind the rubble, a jungle of blood. I knew Jap soldiers were hidden away in the tunnels against the hill, still fighting the war. The terror of my childhood was a crashed and charred fighter-jet lying mangled amid the roots of the trees. Some nights I woke thinking I heard that jet crash into the trees with a noise so great that I knew it was a dream noise—it makes me deaf, but the dream still goes on. In the faint light of that humid night the fighter glowed, lifted itself in my eyes like silver smoke, and brought the taste of metal to my tongue. And I could not stop myself from peering down inside the cockpit, feeling the metal still warm from the burn, reaching down through the broken glass into that old air to brush away the smoke, and finding the broken body of a ghost.
When my father was a young man he tried to climb Mount Shasta in California’s north gold country, but was defeated by the wind rushing down the mountain face. My father said the wind was always the conqueror, not the cold, or the snow, or the heat, but the wind that makes you deaf, numbs your touch, and pushes blood into your eyes.
My father was sleeping in a stone cabin at the foot of Mount Shasta and was awakened by the sickening smell of rotting wood and the muted voices of Chinamen. His bed became soiled with the breath of poor men. He was getting sick in the pre-dawn night when a voice spoke to him, “Do you know me?” a woman asked, touching his ears with her hands.
“Yes,” he lied, seeing the dim outline of her naked body. His eyes filled with smoke. He tried to breathe. The wood of the room smelled like burning dust as he reached for her.
“Are you afraid of dying with me?” she asked, drawing his hand to her stomach, putting her moist mouth in his ear, making him deaf, his throat ached for the moist moss of trees.
“Yes,” he answered, knowing she was the nightmare that made China the bitterness of his grandfather’s and father’s life. He heard her heart beating in his stomach. He left tears on her breast.
In all the days I visited my father in the hospital when he was dying, I don’t remember a single day in detail. I do not remember what I was doing when he died. I do not remember what day he went into the hospital, how many days he stayed there. What time he died. I never asked. I just knew one day in spring, 1957, it was all over. All I had left was a pile of pictures and some clothes my mother put away for me to wear when I got big enough.
My father is twenty-eight years old in the photo I carry of him. I remember him like that. He is seated in a wooden chair on a lawn somewhere, his legs are crossed, he is looking to his right. It is a settled look and if I try there’s an ambitious feeling to the photograph. Perhaps that’s because I’m his son. He is wearing a white shirt, dark V-neck sweater, heavy wool pants, checkered socks, and black shoes. The table at his right is also made of wood. It looks like a wooden box standing on one of its sides. There are heart-shaped holes cut in the two ends of the box table. A folded newspaper separates two empty coffee cups on the tabletop. A stone wall behind him divides the photo in half. Longleaf bushes spill over the top of the stone wall behind him. He is not yet a father. He will not be a father for four more years.
My father will always stay the same in that picture. April, 1945. And when I am twenty-eight we will be the same age. It is dangerous to honor your father. It is hard to really love your father. It is easy to respect him. When you are the same age, or even when you grow older than your father, like growing taller than him, your love changes to honor because you yourself would like to be honored. I must simply love him. When a son takes a risk of love, he naturally loves his father. He commits himself to his father. It is a dangerous risk.
In three more years we will be the same age and I will have been to all the places my father had been.
I remember you, Father, now with urgency. It is night and I am more like you than I have ever been. I hear the same sounds of a tropical night, the clicking of insects, the scrape of a lizard’s claws on the screen door. Tonight I remember a humid night on Guam when I held your forehead in my small hands as I rode on your shoulders. My hands felt your ears, the shape of your chin, and the shape of your nose until you became annoyed and placed my hands back on your forehead and shifted my weight on your shoulders. It is April.
When I was a boy, my father whispered to me from his hospital bed, “Rainsford, I love you more and more.” He cried and I thought he was singing. He was a father to me even when he was dying. He said, “Fathers should confess their youth to their sons. Confess the lovers of their youth.”
My mother kept my father’s love letters to her. I found the letters in an old box. I saw my mother and father in their youth. I see them as I see myself now. They are the celebration of strength for me.
I was left a father to myself after my father’s death. When a son or daughter dies, the parents have another or adopt another child to raise and love. When a family loses a beloved dog, they go out and buy another quickly before the self-pity replaces that life. When a father dies, there is only violence. I am violent. I commit myself to love, saying it is there, but never going further to grasp loving. My real life eludes action. It leaves me a father to myself.
My mother died eight years after
